Contrasting Colours
by readerofasaph
Summary: Kirihara thinks about the colour white, and how it relates to the Rikkai regulars.


Niou's hair is not white.

But it comes close, on summer days when the breeze is warm and the sky is clear like glass, threads of sunlight moving down and reflecting off the trickster's hair; gleaming despite the mountain of gel he plasters on every morning.

Kirihara decides that Niou must bleach his head every two weeks to keep it as pale as he does, and predicts that thirty years from now his hair will be dull and brittle as rusted iron, worn out from over-treatment.

Marui asks Kirihara whether he can imagine Niou as a forty-year-old man. Kirihara answers no without even thinking about it, and realises that it doesn't matter; Niou will die young, long before his hair gives way to the chemical onslaught.

#

White is the colour of sushi rice.

Kirihara loves all types of sushi: _gunkan, ikura, temaki,_ you name it. The tuna _nigiri_ are a lost cause when he's around, and his family has learnt to work around this, mostly by developing tastes for other types of fish.

But even Kirihara can't eat as much sushi as Marui can.

Between Marui's stomach and Kirihara's arcade games, the costs of an outing can escalate rapidly. They've learnt the fine art of borrowing money from the other regulars: what makes Jackal cave in, how to sway Yanagi, and how to tell when Sanada is in a good mood.

They have never been able to get a single yen off Yagyuu.

"The guy creeps me out," Marui complains after receiving a devastatingly polite refusal from him one afternoon. Kirihara keeps this in mind. Marui is a genius, even if he spends too much time harping on about the fact, and his instincts are rarely wrong.

#

Kirihara once asked Yagyuu what he valued most in a person, and he said: "Purity."

Kirihara finds this amusing, and tells Yanagi so, one morning before practice when the world is silent and dew is heavy upon the tennis courts.

Why? Yanagi asks, and Kirihara says, because Yagyuu is not pure at all. Yagyuu is a chaos of colours all forced together, pristine behaviour and fierce undercurrent rubbing against each other. The resultant friction is anything but pure, Kirihara says, although not quite in those words.

Yanagi looks thoughtful at Kirihara's answer, says it looks like I'll have to update your data again, and Kirihara glows inside for a moment, because this is Yanagi's backhanded way of giving a compliment.

What sort of purity do you think Yagyuu is looking for? Yanagi asks, and Kirihara says, maybe someone like Niou-sempai.

White is the colour of purity. But it is also the colour of death.

#

White is Yanagi's favourite colour.

Kirihara finds this bland; bland like the teas and soups Yanagi likes. Yanagi does not like music or art or things that delight the senses. It is like shutting out the sharp edge of reality, Kirihara thinks, and wonders if Yanagi is trying to reduce his life to memory and data, clearing his mind of everything except calculations and the literature he loves.

Kirihara likes colours that are clean and bright: the red of fresh blood, the green of a grassy field, the yellow of a cartoon sun. He likes blue as well, but these days blue reminds him of Yukimura, and maybe this is why Yanagi prefers not to wear colours.

Kirihara knows that for Yanagi and Sanada, Yukimura is light and sound and overwhelming force; to celebrate the brightness of the world in his absence seems almost like an insult.

#

If Kirihara finds anything an affront to Yukimura, it is the starkness of hospital beds.

Hospital sheets are white for sterility. Lying against them, Yukimura is a delicate contrast of colour: if a thousand shades of blue exist, then every single one of them can be found in his eyes.

Kirihara isn't sure what Sanada sees in Yukimura's eyes, besides guilt and desperation and a mirrored obsession. He wishes that Sanada would stop listening to Yukimura and actually _listen_ to Yukimura. "If you know what I mean," he says to Jackal.

("No, I don't know what you mean," Jackal says.)

#

White and black make grey when mingled together. After six months of constant wear, the black of Sanada's baseball cap has not faded, despite heroic efforts from dust and time.

Kirihara secretly hopes that Sanada, like his cap, will never wear down.

Jackal says, "He doesn't get tired because he delegates all the hard jobs to other people. Like keeping an eye on you."

#

Jackal is brown like coffee, brown like rich volcanic soil.

"You're not white at all," Kirihara says. Jackal lifts his hand and snaps his fingers right in front of Kirihara's face, making the younger boy blink.

"Come out of it, Akaya; you're acting really weird today. Let's go play a set, the courts are free right now."

After losing the first three points, Kirihara stops thinking about colours.


End file.
